sins were enormous. Their form of spooning was
'bundling,' an astonishing custom that permitted lovers to lie down in
bed together in the dark, under covers. They were supposed to keep all
their clothes on, but there must have been some mistake somewhere for
the number of illegitimate children and premature children was
stupefying. Dunton tells us that there hardly passed a court day in
Massachusetts without some convictions for fornication, and although the
penalty was fine and whipping, the crime was very frequent.

"Nothing, I repeat, would have surprised the Puritans more than to learn
that their descendants accepted them as saints. They wept, wailed, and
refused to be comforted. They were terrified and horrified by their own
wickedness. The harsh, granite Puritan of our sermons, on statues and
frescoes, was unknown in real life. The real Puritan Zealot spent an
incredible amount of his time in weeping like a silly old woman. Famous
Puritan preachers boast of lying on a floor all night and drenching the
carpet with their tears. Their church services according to their own
accounts, must have been cyclones of hysteria, with the preacher sobbing
and streaming, and the congregation in a state of ululant frenzy, with
men and women fainting on all sides.

"The authorities are the best possible, not the reports of travelers or
the satires of enemies, but the statements of the Puritans themselves,
governors, eminent clergymen, and the official records of the colonies.
Hereafter, anybody who refers to the Puritans as people of exemplary
life, or morality above the ordinary, is either ignorant or a liar. In
our own day, there is an enormous amount of crime and vice among the
clergy. Most horrible murders abound, by ministers, of ministers, and
for ministers. Published and unpublished adulteries, seductions, rapes,
elopements, embezzlements, homosexual entanglements, bigamies, financial
turpitudes, are far more numerous than they should be in proportion to
the clerical population.

"Governor Bradford breaks out in his heart-broken bewilderment and
unwittingly condemns the whole spirit and pretense of Puritanism. The
Puritans fled from the wicked old world for purity's sake, they were
relentless in prayer, they were absolutely under the control of the
church and clergy, and yet, their Governor says that sin flourished more
in Plymouth Colony than in vile London!

"If our people are wicked nowadays because they lack religio